After almost a decade of reflection, University of Pennsylvania researcher James M. Wilson says problems with the gene-therapy experiment that killed an Arizona teenager were "absolutely unacceptable" and ultimately "my responsibility."

"I have tried to admit where I did wrong, where I fell short," Wilson, 53, said this week in his first media interview about Jesse Gelsinger's death in September 1999. "I have tremendous regrets about what happened. I feel absolutely awful about what it has done to the family, to this university, to the field."

Gelsinger's death set off years of government investigations, congressional hearings, and efforts to improve human-subject protections, while the much-hyped but unproven field of gene therapy shriveled and retrenched. In recent years, it has just begun to report some success.

Wilson is still a gene-therapy researcher at Penn, but his well-funded laboratory is focused on the basic test-tube and animal studies that he now says should have been done a decade ago. Recently, he has been giving cautionary lectures to colleagues at Penn and elsewhere on the "lessons" he learned from the tragedy that reshaped...

Last year’s heritable human gene editing scandal continues to reverberate. He Jiankui remains under investigation in China, where authorities have confirmed his work but the extent of his punishment remains unclear, possibly because of some ambiguity in the applicable regulations. He has definitely been fired by his university.

In the US, both Rice University and Stanford are formally investigating faculty members whose involvement with the work may have been more extensive than first thought. Michael Deem of Rice was revealed...

After the heritable human gene editing headlines of late 2018, and considering that the stakes include the future of human biology and the prospect of a new high-tech eugenics, it is no surprise that discussions have continued. What was not widely anticipated, however, was the emergence of a connection between old-school transhumanism, mutated into biohacking, and modern cryptocurrency, in the service of monetizing “the production of designer babies and human germline genetic engineering.”

A Chinese researcher recently disrupted the CCR5 gene, which builds a protein that acts as an entryway that HIV uses to gain entry to T-cells, allegedly creating the world’s first genetically engineered baby. Chinese officials moved swiftly to condemn the...